As Americans turn their attention to the web for both professional and social purposes, marketers will follow suit, as evidenced in Global Web Index’s “A Global Analysis of How Consumers Spend Their Media Time” report. The data found global digital marketing, including social media and mobile internet usage, accounts for 57 percent of daily media time. Overall, consumers spend 5.6 hours per day engaging with digital content. People dedicate 10.7 hours a day consuming all forms of media.

While the U.S. market is slightly behind emerging markets like Argentina and Thailand in digital consumption, American brands still see the future of advertising online. In fact, Ascend2 found that social media marketing remains a top priority for many organizations, as both B2Bs and B2Cs use web content to drive website traffic. A significant percentage of businesses also use social media content to improve search engine rankings, despite not fully understanding how social influences SEO.

The most effective social media marketing strategies are also the most challenging, and marketers need good content to fuel engagement. Business is struggling with strategies and creating high-value content.

Recently we created a free tool that allows users to check the number of fake followers a Twitter account has. We strongly believe that fake followers are detrimental to brands’ Twitters pages and wanted to tell you why.

It's unlikely your social media posts will enjoy the level of popularity as say, a President Obama or Justin Bieber, but you certainly don't need to be a White House resident or have a trendy chili-bowl haircut to make your voice known. It just takes a few key strategies to put your company out there.

"Listen to your audience.Have you ever been on a bad date in which the person wouldn't stop talking about himself or herself? It's a huge turnoff. The same "it's not all about me" etiquette applies to social media interactions. "

Many small businesses are using social media and content marketing to generate traffic and leads for their business. Being a small business helping other small businesses with their online marketing results, we have personal experiences with both. These are two great methods, but one in particular holds a lot more long-term value than the other. Do you know which one it is? (spoiler alert: look at the graph to the right) Let’s take a minute to discuss both of these methods and then you can make your own decision regarding which is more valuable....

Bunkr is a new web app which allows you to easily collect and organize all of your existing content and images and to build up visual presentations by easily dragging and dropping your selected items into a dedicated presentation area.

Bunkr slides can be easily edited, with text, images or video clips. Slides can be easily deleted, moved or rearranged intuitively.

An integrated library + search facility makes it easy to organize in a professional way all of your imported content so that you can use it for more than just one time.

The final presentation can be saved, previewed and exported to HTML5 iframe embed code, PDF or PPTX formats for final publication and distribution.

My initial impressions are quite positive as the tool feels fast, and quite intuitive (after you have seen the tutorial clips). From there everything works as expected and once you have imported your selected content, you can build a presentation in a matter of minutes.

Some features that would make Bunkr an immediate winner with me would be:

a) Ability to search for resources (content+images+video) out on the web

b) Option to import an image in a slide and have it automatically fill the whole slide

c) Better text control handling (small controls, low usability) to make it easy to edit text easily and format it faster

Foursquare has released a new app that is drawing widespread praise from business managers who have had an opportunity to check it out.

“Get more customers walking through the door with Foursquare’s free app for businesses,” Foursquare says, adding that the app lets managers post local updates, activate and deactivate specials, and even track analytics.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.